This file provides information for replicating the results from Charles Cameron and Jonathan Kastellec. 2015. "Panel Composition and Voting on the U.S. Courts of Appeals Over Time." American Political Science Review.

DATA

The base data files are as follows: 
	-- "roll_call_data_updated_for_replication.dta": Roll call data on every nominee (with a roll call vote) from 1937-2010, at the level of the individual senator
	-- "nominee_level_data_updated_for_replication.dta":  Summary data at the level of the nominee.
	-- For information on the variables in these datasets, see "codebook.PDF"
	-- We also use:
		-- "bailey_senators_updated.dta": The Bailey scores for individual senators.
		-- "NOMINATE_DW_from_senate_estimates.dta":  The DW-NOMINATE scores for individual senators.
		-- "pres_party_by_congress.csv": The party of the president, by Congress, used to code the location of filibuster pivots. (100==Democrat, 200=Republica)
	
SCRIPTS

There are four scripts we used in our analysis:

-- Script 1 ('script_01_set_up_data_with_simulations.R') takes the above datasets and simulates the relevant ideal points.
	-- Note that the script is set to run 100 simulations. For the final results in the paper, we used 1,000 simulations. (It doesn't really make a difference, but the 1,000 simulations take a while to run).
	-- Also note that we have not set any seeds, so the results will differ slightly compared to the results in the paper, due to natural variation across different runs of the simulations.
	-- This script creates the following datasets:
		-- "simulated_sen_level_data_from_R_new.dta": Simulations of each senator's idea points. This dataset has n.sims observations for each senator-nominee pair.
		-- "simulated_nom_level_data_from_R_new.dta": Simulations for each nominee's ideal point (and other summary measures at the nominee level). This dataset has n.sims observations for each nominee.

-- Script 2 ('script_02_create_objects_for_graphs.R') creates some objects used to in the code to create graphs in Scripts 3 and 4.

-- Script 3 ('script_03_senate_analyses.R') contains the code to perform all of the Senate-based analyses, including those in the Supplemental Appendix.

-- Script 4 ('script_04_president_analyses.R') contains the code to perform all of the president-based analyses, including those in the Supplemental Appendix.

-- Script 5 ('script_05_descriptive_analyses.R') contains the code to make the descriptive graphs in Appendix Section A.1


-- SESSION INFO for R

Finally, here is the sessionInfo() on the version of R we used for our analyses.

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.1 (2015-06-18)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.7.5 (Lion)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] reshape2_1.4.1 lmtest_0.9-34  zoo_1.7-12     car_2.1-1      plyr_1.8.3    
 [6] arm_1.8-6      lme4_1.1-10    Matrix_1.2-1   MASS_7.3-40    foreign_0.8-63

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_0.12.3        magrittr_1.5       splines_3.2.1     
 [4] lattice_0.20-31    minqa_1.2.4        stringr_1.0.0     
 [7] tools_3.2.1        nnet_7.3-9         pbkrtest_0.4-4    
[10] parallel_3.2.1     grid_3.2.1         nlme_3.1-120      
[13] mgcv_1.8-6         quantreg_5.19      coda_0.18-1       
[16] MatrixModels_0.4-1 abind_1.4-3        nloptr_1.0.4      
[19] stringi_1.0-1      SparseM_1.7       
>